Alain Jacquet (1939–2008) bridged the worlds of European and American Pop art. Largely self-taught, he got his start in Paris in the early 1960s, when he was associated with the burgeoning Nouveau Réalisme movement. The group’s founder, art critic and curator Pierre Restany, defined their approach as a “poetic recycling of urban, industrial, and advertising reality." Seeking to engage the world around them, often with a critical edge, they incorporated images and objects from daily life into their art. During this time, Jacquet began his Camouflages series, 1962–64, in which he merged iconic paintings from art history with images from commercial culture. Among the series is Camouflage Mondrian, Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1963.

Jacquet takes Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1942–43, as his starting point. Mondrian made Broadway Boogie Woogie shortly after immigrating to New York to escape the rise of Fascism in Europe. Reflecting the sense of possibility and liberation he felt in the city, he captured the energy of its gridded streets and flashing lights in multicolored squares. Acquired by The Museum of Modern Art one year after he completed it, the painting was an established masterwork by the time Jacquet used it as a point of departure for his homage.

Under Mondrian’s gridded composition, Jacquet paints a girl carrying a basket and smelling a flower. Stylized and flat, the image of the girl looks like it could have been sourced from an advertisement or a children’s book illustration—in striking contrast to Mondrian’s austere grid. Jacquet extended this playful clashing of high and low throughout his Camouflages. In Camouflage Botticelli, (Birth of Venus), 1963–64, for example, the goddess emerges from a Shell Oil gas pump.

In 1964, Jacquet moved to New York. He soon became part of the nascent scene developing around Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, and Andy Warhol. “Lichtenstein and I exchanged very rapid-fire retorts,” he later recalled. “When I realized that he had taken a Picasso in order to transform it, I appropriated his work to camouflage it in turn.” The artist was referring to Camouflage Lichtenstein/Picasso, Femme dans un fauteuil, 1963, in which he quotes Lichtenstein’s Woman with Flowered Hat, 1963, which, in turn, was Lichtenstein’s homage to a portrait of Dora Maar by Picasso.

The same year he arrived in New York, Jacquet was given a solo exhibition of his Camouflages by the influential gallerist Alexander Iolas, who played a key role in bringing Nouveau Réalisme to the U.S. The exhibition, which included Camouflage Mondrian, Broadway Boogie Woogie, propelled his career, and his works were featured in solo exhibitions worldwide. Jacquet delighted in testing the boundaries of authorship and style, and in exploring the instability and ambiguity of images, in an era when everything could be reproduced.

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